The present invention relates to livestock care and stable maintenance tools and devices, and in particular, to a mucking devices and methods for using same.
Boarding, stabling, and transporting horses and other livestock animals requires the removal of animal waste from pens, stalls, paddocks, trailers and other areas where the animals are housed, kept or transported. The removal of animal waste is required not only for the health and safety of the animals being housed, but can also provide the users with the opportunity to reclaim value from the animal waste in the form of manure. The manure can be used as a resource on the user's own property, as fertilizer or mulch, but can also provide a secondary form of income from the sale of the manure. The process and task of removing animal waste, such as horse maneuver, is traditionally referred to as mucking.
Conventional mucking typically involves removing all soiled bedding material from animal stall or pen. In such practices, users simply use a shovel or other scooping implement to remove all the bedding along with the animal waste. For economic reasons, some users choose to sift through the bedding material to remove only the animal waste and the soiled bedding material, while leaving behind the majority of the clean and unsoiled bedding material. Such practices are intended to reduce the amount of bedding used and, consequently, reduce the expense of the bedding material in the animal boarding operation.
Traditionally, sifting through the bedding material to remove only the animal waste and the soiled bedding material requires the use of a pitchfork or a specially made mucking or manure rake. The sifting process using conventional tools, such as a pitchfork or a mucking rake, is a time and labor intensive process which may or may not be justified by the cost savings achieved by salvaging the bedding material from a soiled animal enclosure. For the sake of simplicity and clarity, examples of mucking an animal enclosure, while attempting to salvage unsoiled bedding material, will be described in reference to horse boarding and care.
When mucking a horse's stall, a user will first locate the area to be cleaned. Such areas, which are often lined with a bedding material like saw dust, wood shavings or straw, are usually soiled by some combination of urine and animal feces. Once the area to be cleaned is located, the user will scoop up some amount of material that typically includes a combination of urine, manure, bedding material, dirt and mud. The user then shakes, bounces or sifts the material to allow the unsoiled bedding material to pass through or over the walls of the scooping implement. The scooping implement, like a pitch fork or mucking rake, include a number of elements that are spaced out such that the manure and urine clumped bedding material will be held, while the unsoiled and loose bedding material and dirt will pass through the spaces between the elements. Examples of such elements include the tines of a pitchfork or a grating or grid of mucking rake. Once the majority of the unsoiled and loose bedding material and dirt passes through the scooping implement, the animal waste and some amount of the soiled bedding material can be deposited in a receptacle for storage, transport, or disposal. This process is repeated until all of this animal waste and soiled bedding material is removed from the horse stall.
Despite the apparent simplicity of the task, mucking a horse stall is an arduous and messy endeavor. The weight of a shovelful of material, material that includes some amount of bedding material and animal waste, can be quite heavy to lift. Additionally, bouncing, shaking, and sifting the un-soiled bedding material from the animal waste and the soiled bedding material can require a significant amount of effort due to the weight of the material and the arrangement of the different constituent parts of the material lifted. It is not uncommon that the animal waste desired to be removed to become tangle or trapped in the bedding material, thus making it more difficult to separate the waste and soiled bedding material from the bedding material that can still be used.
In addition to the physical effort and strain to bounce, shake or sift, the material, the difficulty and unpleasantness of the task is compounded by the fact that excessive agitation of the material to separate the waste from the bedding material often causes significant amounts of dust, animal waste particulate matter, and bedding material to be dispersed into the air of the area being cleaned. Such material dispersed into the air can potentially cause health and hygiene hazards for caretakers and animals alike. Embodiments of the present disclosure are directed toward simplifying, and reducing the amount of effort, unpleasantness, and potential hazards associated with mucking an animal stall or enclosure.